What’s the difference between a Country, Constituent Country, Sovereign State, or a Nation?
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>Sovereign State
This is probably what you’re thinking of when you say “country.” Here are the generally accepted criteria:
1. A permanent population
2. A defined territory
3. A government not under another
4. And the capacity to interact with other sovereign states, i.e. through foreign affairs.
The US, Canada, France, China, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, etc, these are all sovereign states.
> Country
Strictly speaking this just means “a geographic area” regardless of its political status. E.g. you may have heard of the “Basque Country” (a region defined by shared culture and language that stretches between Spain and France) or the “Texas Hill Country,” a region defined by a particular topography.
However when most English speakers say “country” they mean “sovereign state,” except in the case of…
> Constituent Country
In the UK this refers to England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the four “countries” that make up the sovereign state of the UK. To my knowledge the UK is the only state that refers to its subnational entities as “countries,” but it does so because the regions were historically independent kingdoms.
> Nation
This one is nebulous, but a “nation” generally refers to a collective identity shared between people. Roughly speaking it has less to do with where you live and more with who you are, what language you speak, what religion you follow, etc.
Country means a piece of land usually associated with some polity. Often it’s used to refer to sovereign nation-states in modern times. Constituent country just means the country is just one part of a grander federation, confederation, alliance, or organization. Constituent means it’s something that constitutes something else. Sovereign state means a polity that has no higher governing body than its own government. Nation can be used synonymsly with country or nation-state, but in more academic speech it’s often used to mean a people who share an identity of some kind. It gets very complicated but on a very basic level it’s just people who want to associate with each other on a national level.
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